


The Millennium Deal - Prologue: Burnt Bridges

by Cara_Loup



Series: The Millennium Deal [1]
Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Adventure, Friendship/Love, M/M, Mystery, Romance, Telepathic Bond, The Force
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-07
Updated: 2015-12-07
Packaged: 2018-05-05 13:34:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5377121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cara_Loup/pseuds/Cara_Loup
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A city twice fallen. To the Rebel Alliance first, and now bombed to the edge of oblivion by its former denizens. The galaxy’s jeweled crown picked bare to its ugly bones.<br/>The sight kicks off a question like an eddy in the stillness. It circles and circles until it forms a funnel, narrow as a gunsight, and every other thought, every sentiment has to wrench through it and comes out warped and tainted.<br/><i>What if only one of them survives?</i><br/>Leia or Luke.<br/>Luke or Leia.<br/>As if the crazy roulette in his head could make any difference.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Millennium Deal - Prologue: Burnt Bridges

  
**Prologue: Burnt Bridges  
**

A chunk of glowing slag has bitten a hole into the sole of his left boot. He stamps it out on a crust of burst locktar, one hand gripping steel for balance. He should have noticed. The grip soles resemble a cratered landscape, plastic shards and scraps of gleaming formex fused with the hard rubber. A sting of scorching heat scoots up his leg, sensation rushing to confirm what his eyes tell him.

He snorts inside the breath mask. He can’t be bothered with this. So long as he keeps walking, he can pace himself to practical concerns. One step at a time, each tracking closer to deliverance. And that’s all he’ll let himself believe.

Somewhere above the mushroom of toxic smokes wheels a lone engine like a crazed moth. Blinded, every sensor array about to short out under the barrage of heat and radiation belching from the city’s ripped belly. His ship, ready to dive to the rescue. If there’s anyone left to be rescued.

 _Stop that, damn you!_ he snarls at himself.

He adjusts his goggles, swiping soot off the scratched plexi surface. Visibility is down to twenty meters, and he checks the wrist-compass for directions. It points him towards a ledge sloping down to the next level.

The ledge consists of nothing but liquid polymers, superheated and solidified in mid-air, a last, haphazard catwalk across unknown degrees of destruction. Twenty paces later, the catwalk widens and thins into a clouded, yellowed sheet like dirty ice. Through it, he can see the gashes torn into the cityscape.

A city twice fallen. To the Rebel Alliance first, and now bombed to the edge of oblivion by its former denizens. The galaxy’s jeweled crown picked bare to its ugly bones. A hum prickles through stagnant air.

When he cranes his neck and looks back, searchlights converge on the webwork of skeletal girders, fallen communication spires and power lines. No vehicle can safely navigate a maze like this, not before scouts have charted the danger zones.

In pairs, volunteers descend metal slides that flap from hovercrafts like tongues from parched jaws. Inflated environmental suits turn the scouts into rubber dolls, their faceplates glittering in the brown gloom. They start at the top level where nothing much remains, scrambling and struggling like gnats in a giant spiderweb. They’ve wasted hours to get into all the safety gear. He couldn’t wait that long.

From the synthetic glacier, he jumps three meters that separate him from a drooping skyway, the jolt stabbing pain through his knees. The skyway’s quickthrow cover is a mass of hot slag, and he sinks in to the ankle with each step. He walks faster, a sleepwalker trying to cross a swamp.

The hazed hemisphere ahead has to be the dome of the Senate hall, and the sight nearly turns his stomach, because it looks so treacherously intact. Getting his hopes up is not a good idea right now. But the sight kicks off a question like an eddy in the stillness.

It’s the kind of question no one can afford under these circumstances. It circles and circles until it forms a funnel, narrow as a gunsight, and every other thought, every perception and sentiment has to wrench through it and comes out warped and tainted.

 _What if only one of them survives?_  
Leia or Luke.  
Luke or Leia.

As if the crazy roulette in his head could make any difference. But the question persists.  


Luke or Leia.  
Leia or Luke.  
What if.

A thought firing like a final bullet. And the feeling is way too familiar, complete with the icy burn of adrenaline pooling over his stomach. Just one shot left, and damned if he can’t make it count.

Sweat drips from his forehead, fogs up the goggles, and runs rivulets through the soot on his face.

 _Who died and made you the scorekeeper of doom?_ he asks himself angrily. But it doesn’t stop him from wondering.

 _If I could make a goddamn wish, just one_ —

To escape that kind of thinking, he thrusts his mind back into the past, in search of the critical error, and counts a full score.

 _Too soon_ , frets the cheap wisdom of hindsight. Too soon to make Coruscant the seat of the new government, a nesting place for corrupt bureaucrats and booby traps, five months after the battle of Endor. Even at the time it felt like stepping into the wrong kind of boots that march only to a single tune. But political pressure set in from all sides, herding Mon Mothma into the presidential chair under a canopy of tattered planetary shields. Madness or incredible arrogance, or both. Pluck the crown jewel from the hands of certified yes-men, and seize the crown. So much for democracy.

As if each separate outfit in the Alliance had subscribed to the idea in the first place. The military didn’t relish the notion of taking orders from civilians. The grandstanders worried about the military knack to assume a war, if armed conflict should by accident cease. And that’s just one of the fault lines. For a while, claiming Coruscant welded them back together into a functional whole. Until the first hairline fissures showed around the old cracks.

Hot slag sucks at his boots, and the heat clamps around his calves like parts of an armor in the process of being molded to his body. The reek of smoldering rubber is absorbed into heavy, acrid fumes as gods-know-what gases escape into atmosphere that no longer deserves the name. He can tell that the military will blame the government and vice versa, and he doesn’t care. He’s only got himself to blame.

The first rumors made him laugh. An amassment of Imperial flotillas in an unclaimed region of the Mid Rim, along a front line that didn’t make any sense. Ripe for the taking. That kind of luck couldn’t be for real. But Intell reports confirmed the rumors, and the Admiralcy had a new cause to gear up for.

By that time, every lawless instinct screamed _trap_ at him. Harnessed by his own rank as Alliance general, he made the crucial mistake of trying to hammer a hunch into failsafe tactical reasoning. It didn’t work.

Imperial raids on neutral worlds erased the benefit of doubt in short order. Planetary delegations screamed outrage. The fallen Empire had thrown down the gauntlet, and the New Republic rose to the bait. Only a token force remained to protect Coruscant. The rest will go down in history as a textbook mistake of galactic proportions, a smudge across the brass halo of the New Republic that’ll never come off.

But there is no New Republic, not anymore. Not after this.

A nervous roar rattles his comlink.

“Yeah, Chewie, I know it’s dangerous,” he snaps, his voice blurred by the breath mask. The Senate hall a wraith floating some hundred meters away. “I’ll let you know the minute I’ve found something.”

Something, not someone ― the language of caution. He feels like he’s roaming the inside of a corpse.

Another spill of polymers has glazed the cupola above the Senate hall, like septic honey dribbled from a giant glass. As he moves closer, he can see the cracks in the crystal dome, but it holds together. Some buildings have been constructed to outlive history. _Good news_ , he thinks without a trace of irony. There’s no way in hell he could have climbed in through the roof.

This is where he’ll start the search for real. He’ll work his way across the dead stretch between here and the administrative wing of the Palace, every yard marked by regrets that he’s never had the patience to memorize Leia’s schedule. Luke, spared the dubious honor of a public office, gets by without a fixed schedule. And who’s to say if the Senate had even convened at the time of the attack.

There’s just one thing he knows: if they’re alive, they’ll know of each other, and the sentiment that bubbles up alongside comes close to envy. That much certainty seems like a far-off prize right now.

The skyway runs into abrupt brown murk. He peers over the jagged edge, aware that every moment’s consideration comes at the price of another burn hole in his boots. On the level below, a toppled radar array juts from a flat rooftop. Close enough to swing across.

He uncoils the steel rope from his belt, and the hook catches at once. He tugs sharply, testing its hold, and miscalculates. The length of rope sends him smashing through a half-shattered window, and he lands in a spray of splinters, a razor-sharp parody of snow. He wears gloves and cuts his hands through the leather, but the stairwell is passable if unlit. Sparks fizzle in blue from ruptured power leads.

Ten levels down, the devastation sediments into rubble, twisted girders and buildings pitched at odd angles.

A city built as precariously as this one, glued together by spite and the architectural triumph of one generation over the next, has structural weakness written all over it. He could sketch a map of the worst damage now, angry yellow blips on a targeting grid.

Imperial bomb squads have ducked in under the flaky polar shields and planted their load of detonators with desperate precision. Instead of trying to hit the Palace, they’ve attacked the power generators and the pipelines. The sequence of explosions has collapsed a phalanx of old permacite towers, and they’ve crashed into the flank of the hollowed mountain that carries the government precinct on its shoulders. There’s no telling when the entire plateau will cave in.

And if it does, the rescue teams can pack it in and hit the fast track home.

Smoke crawls up the stairwell. The muted roar of fires like a cyclone corralled in the basement. He cranks a door open and the draft almost slams him backwards.

Down the hall, the first bodies lie in the grotesque arrangement of death. Blown from their offices, from behind their desks and their monitors, scraps of their work littering the debris. Hands glued to molten plastic. He fights an urge to turn each of them over, the desire for certainty at war with a stronger need to keep control. Instead, he wipes a door plaque with his sleeve.

This is the customs division, and he can’t think of a single necessity that could have summoned Leia or Luke to this department. But his thoughts turn into another landslide just like that.

They could both be dead, coffined in an amalgam of permacite and plastene. Burned and trapped far from hope for medical assistance, skin and flesh purpled by radioactive heat. Or stuck in a lift cabin on a lower level. He can see the blocked shaft instantly, feel the scrape of dust and ash in his lungs. Emergency lighting goes first, oxygen is next, and then they’re counting out the time they’ve got left to breathe.

Luke or Leia.  
_If I had to choose_.

 _Both_ , he could answer, and offer himself for an exchange of hostages. Fate snarling a grin at his cheap evasion.

Through the mutinous blank in his mind, earlier answers flash like frosted meteorites, each striking a landmark of his private topography. Morning mists over the jungles of Yavin Four, snowfields on Hoth, sieved light in a holding cell on Bespin. Protective instinct bursting to the surface like a sudden ache. But that old instinct has been churning for months, useless, just like his pilot’s reflexes and all the tricks of the trade are now useless. A general’s decisions are controlled by entirely different factors.

 _Luke can take care of himself_ , Leia’s voice insinuates itself with fond mockery. He has never worried about her in the same way, an odd demonstration of respect. He can see her wistful expression now, like a memento, and Luke’s sun-dazzled smile, the one he reserves for close friends.

Memories prey on him as he turns into the bent corridor that links this tract with the Senate complex. Lino flooring has melted down to the parallel tracks of steel girders, a metallic show of defiance in the ooze of unsubstantial daylight.

As he skids across, he catches himself thinking, _this is hell_. A jaded curse lashing back with a vengeance, suddenly made real. And he can’t live another hour, another minute like this, fear like a beast in his belly, eating its way out through his liver.

He blasts the jammed door at the end of the corridor, but the next portal responds to his clearance code and swings open like a trap-door into the magic mountain.

Alarms howl from the vestal white of steelstone walls, fluorescent spotlights slicken black marble tiles with reflections like raindrops. The clinical brightness slams into him, and he wastes a moment wrestling with heedless relief. All the same, this new wing isn’t called the bunker tract for nothing. This is where delegates and senators meet, to discuss strategies and strike deals. Now the corridors shelter breathable air, laced with a smell of fresh disinfectant.

He rips off an access plate and plunges both hands inside to switch off the alarms. The P.A. system, running on the same independent circuits as the lighting, is fully functional and will broadcast his voice through the conference parlors on five stories. He listens to the metallic distortions behind closed doors after the third repeat, then his voice falls into silence.

So the Senate had started its first session of the day after all. And barometric controls malfunction again, he thinks when his breath plumes into sterilized air. The goggles and the sticky mouthpiece dangle at his throat where his heart beats out a frantic rhythm.

At first he mistakes the hollow thumping for an echo of his own pulse, but a primitive code is tapped out. Three thumps, followed by a pregnant interval of silence, then repeated with mechanical insistence. He follows the noise like a homing beacon. If they’re not here, he’ll have to dig through the ruins of a collapsed tower, to get to the ministerial wing. He catches himself calculating time and distance like this is a serious option.

The thumping drags him to shielded portals that give access to the senatorial chambers. Though right now they’re sealed shut by emergency protocols. He bangs his fist against an immaculately polished surface, returning the signal, but the thumping continues. Punctures his efforts to crosswire the controls and sets a pace for his heartbeat, a welcome interruption of the glutinous silence that still rings in his ears.

His fingers perform with a mind of their own. For all the sweat running down the sides of his face, a cold stillness persists in his body, spreading from his chest to his shoulders. Arctic lighting prickles the back of his neck, but he manages an override that sends a shower of sparks across his torn gloves.

Like frozen curtains, the doors reel open and release an avalanche of rubble into the pristine corridor. In the gloom beyond, the vast, semicircular lobby of the Senate hall is a theater of fractured permacite and vague shadows. It looks as if half the city has crashed in through the roof. He coughs and spits stone dust as a metal ghost staggers through the gritty swirls. A protocol droid has been banging its inflexible hand against the upper part of the door without making a dent. Hydraulic joints creak awfully with each step.

For a moment, stunned rage grips him. What if only the droids survive, parked close to the entrance while everyone else filed down the hall? He envisions them in clusters right underneath the spot where a new roof has been fitted against more durable walls, twenty-five meters above the newly laid tiles, and his mind ascends in escape while the grit settles.

“Han!”

The shout claws out of dust-thickened air, out of his own memories. The same voice has given him directions in Jabba’s palace when his ocular nerve was still shot with hibernation sickness. Relief breaks through him in long, sickening waves, and the roulette stops.

“Han.”

Closer, the repetition of his name measures the exact distance between them. He wades through the rubble, each step trailed by slow, stony trickles.

A wedge of light creeps in from the corridor and fingers the dirt smears on Luke’s black uniform, falls against the side of his neck.

“I knew you’d find us.”

The hands that close around his upper arms express the same conviction. Quietly certain. But the smile is something else, it breaks across Luke’s face like a sudden discovery, and he catches himself grinning back, he can’t stop it. If nothing else, it reveals him to himself.

“You’re okay? Nothing broken?”

“I’m fine, Han.”

There’s a wry twitch to Luke’s mouth, even now, illuminating the kind of strength he’s learned to dredge up at a moment’s notice. His hair has grown long enough to fall into his eyes and curls slightly over one ear, dark with sweat and grime. And once again, all the weariness has retreated to his eyes. Dusty blue, a glance that shores up anger and bitterness for times to come. It’s possible that Luke knew what would happen and chose to stay around anyway.

“Good.” He means it, and there’s nothing else to say, nothing that he can think of.

Han reaches up to wrap a hand around Luke’s fingers before they separate, and by then the shakiness has passed.

“How’s Leia?” he asks, even though it’s unnecessary. That much confidence couldn’t hold up if anything serious had happened to her.

“She’s okay, but she needs a doctor.” Concern comes as swiftly and freely as that brilliant smile while Luke talks, steering him through the carnage. “She was working with the rest of us, clearing away some of the debris, when another part of the roof collapsed, and she twisted her leg when she fell. It looks as if a bone has splintered just below the knee.”

“It’ll take some time before we can get an ambulance squad in,” Han returns while his eyes begin to decipher the dimness.

His moment of relief has worn itself out by the time they reach her, propped against one of the white pillars that rib the walls. Leia looks alert even when she’s huddled up around crippling pain, her senator’s robe in shreds below the knee. Strips must have been ripped from it for dressings.

He squats in front of her. “Hey.”

There’s a moment when he thinks she’ll heft the weight of desperation to fling it in his face, but then she just clasps his hand with cold fingers and too much pressure. Furious brown eyes reflect the betrayal of a dream.

He leans over to sink his mouth into her hair and inhales a whiff of smoke, drawing it deep into his lungs, where it burns together with the fervor of gratitude. For a moment, he can’t look at either of them, he’s so goddamned grateful and mortified that fate can be far more generous than he’d expected. He wonders what he owes, for this miracle. He’s having odd thoughts that don’t feel like it’s him at all.

“What do we do now?” Luke asks, leaving the decision to him like a tribute.

Han gets to his feet. Time to shunt all the maudlin derailments and nudge his brain into pragmatic mode. That’s what he does best at the worst of times. “We move everyone up to the bunker tract while we wait for the rescue teams. Much safer there.”

“Everyone who can be moved,” Leia adds caustically, gritting back the pain.

When he reports their present coordinates, Chewbacca bellows his relief for half a minute. Bewilderment moves across their faces as they listen. Some things are still ordinary, the same as always.

“I hope our defense councilors will learn from this,” Leia says with a glare at the destruction.

Han doesn’t tell her that he ordered his segment of the fleet on a Core-ward course the minute the news came through. A decision for which the Admiralcy can hang defection on him — defection or mutiny — if they want to. It’s all the same to him: an easy way out.

 

Later, he sits back down next to Leia in her cranny by the pillar. His arm cushions her tense shoulders and she leans against him, her body pliant and familiar, fitting against his side.

Over two hundred senators, aides, councilors and delegates line the corridors of the bunker tract, nursing bruises, sprains, fractured bones, lacerations of every kind. Suspects for internal injuries remain down here in the lobby, at least for the time being, and Leia is too exhausted to battle the pain in her leg. They’ve saved the final shot of analgesics from the Falcon’s medikit for her. When Luke joins them, she talks herself to sleep, considering political consequences and necessary action, her mind halfway through the torturous process of rebuilding.

Far from arguing, Han keeps his breathing slow and level when her head finally sags against his chest. Rebuilding will take years, but reclaiming faith in the New Republic is a whole other matter. The look on Luke’s face admits the difference, the raised likelihood of failure. All the same, neither of them will consider alternatives. Han can’t begin to imagine the pressure of a dream like that.

He’s always been wary of letting himself be possessed by anything. The only ambition that ever grew into a constant companion was the dream of his own ship and the fantastic speeds he’d coax from her. That he got lucky and bagged the Falcon in a sabacc game was about the only proof of higher justice he’d ever seen.

And each time he flies her, the Falcon still packs dreams like other ships pack mileage and firepower. When he’s bunked down somewhere planetside, she’ll surround his sleep, a battered canvas for images painted out of darkness, her drive’s hum mingling with his own breaths. She moves with him, in and out of his dreams.

“We’ll be out of here in a couple hours,” he tells Luke who’s settling down on his other side, relaxing by careful degrees.

“How did the Rim campaign go?” Luke asks.

They’ve both lowered their voices, and the twilight makes each conversation sound more intimate.

“You weren’t there for the final strategy meeting.” Han blows out a long breath of derision. “It was... loud.”

From the shadows on his right comes a soft laugh, little more than a rustle.

“I got nailed with the job of taking out one of their bases while the real action went down somewhere else,” he continues. “After that we were sitting in the Clareen Straits, blocking their likeliest escape route. That’s when the news came through.”

“And you were on your way back here,” Luke finishes for him.

He lifts one shoulder. “I figured it was one big diversion anyway.”

Several meters into the shadows, someone mutters half-conscious curses. The beam of a glowtorch tunnels through the gloom and swings from side to side as a droid checks up on the critical cases in their beds of rubble. Somewhere high up, above the smoke, night steals over this side of Coruscant.

“You might be in trouble for this,” Luke says.

“You think I care?”

“No.” Amusement colors Luke’s voice, but his hand moves at the same time and lights on Han’s arm for a second. It’s one of those gestures that belong to the kid he used to be. Affectionate, awkward, exuberant in almost every sentiment, and easily baited.

Han turns his head, catching the moment when the torch is aimed at Luke and the white beam wanders slowly from tangled hair to temple to cheekbone, caressing his face in light. Each line stark in the snowy brilliance, cut out from a backdrop of dust-swirls.

Blackness returns before Luke can raise a hand to shield his eyes, but his voice changes when he says, “We’ll lose the Mon Calamarians after this.”

 _We’ll lose a good deal more_ , Han thinks what they both know.

Their shoulders touch in the dark, and Luke holds himself still in a way that makes Han wonder if there’s a changed awareness between them or if it’s just his own wrecked state. He closes his eyes and orders his mind to rest, but it’s one of those things that never work when they’re needed the most.

Luke’s face is pinned to the inside of his lids in all that unyielding clarity, blond lashes almost white in the probing beam.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”

A moment later, he’s no longer sure if he’s really said it out loud, and Luke’s silence gives him no clue.

It has never been his own choice, Han thinks, weary and bothered enough to be as unfair as he likes. They’ve chosen him. Luke first, with his stubborn belief in all things impossible, then Leia. But they never had to choose each other. Makes sense in the light of their kinship, he thinks. Twins are supposed to have that basic kind of accord, it’s genetic or ― in their case ― another clandestine Force effect, or both. No matter how much and how often they disagree, neither of them will depart from the shared grounds of conviction. And the only choice they’ve ever left him is to leave or to stay.

He falls asleep once, and in his sleep he sees Leia’s hair spread through a bubble of frosted yellow polymers, a perversion of amber globules that encase the fragile specimens of another era. Her face composed, the color of pearl. Luke’s absence from that dream is like a strange portent.

Han comes awake to the obnoxious pounding of his heart, and his body relives the terror with a sudden violence as if it had all happened months ago, not just a few hours before. Brother and sister on either side of him, their warmth leavening through his clothes, providing skin comfort. Leia’s small hand is curled possessively around his arm, Luke’s thigh rests alongside his own, and the wall has pressed a cold line all the way down his back. Keeping himself motionless has grown into the kind of exercise that starts cramping his gut.

He compromises by turning his face, but he still has to use his imagination to see Luke in the dark where the contours of his body are so much closer.

For the first time in months, Han thinks about Luke’s hand and the creeping sense of loss that grew on him at the change in his friend. The tracks left by a lonely weight of secrets. But most of the changes reached their full momentum when he wasn’t around, and in a way that makes it easier to hang on to his memory of the farm kid, wide-eyed and lanky in his baggy tunic. He can tell it sets Luke at ease when they reiterate those times and their legacy of well-worn wisecracks together.

Memory sprawls out into the gritty darkness, shuffling flashes of recollection like a deck of sabacc cards. Moments that he shared with Luke in what seems like a different life, now. Taking the Falcon for a spin, flushed in the brief glory of rogue maneuvers, a fast exchange of repartee and friendly, mocking challenges. Sometimes all that can be hammered into a bulwark against politics and duty. Safe behind it, they can laugh at themselves. Trust has always been an immutable factor between them, ever since the first battle, but now Han wonders how much further he can trust himself. How much longer he can use that thin screen of friendly, innocuous memories to make sense of the present.

 _It’s nothing_ , he argues with the troubled knot lacing tighter in his gut. Just the phantoms of adrenaline, of too many hours in this crater beneath the destruction of the city.

Two hours later, his comlink whistles. The rescue teams have cleared a path, and the first shuttle has landed atop the bunker tract. Medics are on their way down. Awake at once, Leia props herself up with a thin-lipped curse because they’re going to carry her out on a stretcher.

When Han gets up, his boots feel as if they’ve been glued to his feet and ankles, the soles a mess of clumped rubber below the heels. They’ll have to be cut off his feet later, and that’s when the burns will start hurting.

Whatever comes next, he’ll make sure that his choices are clear.

In the twilight, he can feel Luke watching him. He doesn’t look back.

* * * * *

**Author's Note:**

> First published as a standalone novel in 2001.


End file.
